How can researchers write accessible summaries of academic papers?
After editing ~350 @voxdev.bsky.social articles, I hopefully have something useful to say. Here are the key takeaways from editing first drafts of academics trying to write for policy audiences 🧵 1/10
After editing ~350 @voxdev.bsky.social articles, I hopefully have something useful to say. Here are the key takeaways from editing first drafts of academics trying to write for policy audiences 🧵 1/10
Comments
- The 🥇 objective is the accessibility of economic research
- More rigorous than a newspaper opinion piece, much more accessible than a journal article
- Contribution to the policy debate, not a press release
- Use clear, descriptive subheadings
1. Don’t jump from impossibly broad introductions straight into the methodology
2. Don’t end impossibly narrow – think critically about external validity
- Why should policymakers care about your paper?
- Move incrementally from the big picture issue to your specific study
- Avoid your only conclusion being that a policy may/could/can/potentially/might have an impact.
- The hardest, & most useful, part of writing a paper summary is a conclusion that considers generalisability
- Include details about implementation
- What happened after your research?
- Avoid describing modes or robustness checks
Academics are allowed to know things. There are a growing number of topics where the weight of evidence does point in a specific direction, so say so.